Where Defeat Is Not An Option

Not one Democrat Presidential candidate has condemned the Hamas rocket attacks on Israel. Only two Democrat Senators have condemned the attacks (Rosen D-NV and Sinema D-AZ: and tip of the hat to both of them). The Democrats have made the choice that joining up with Islamists is a better future than defending Jews.

Side note: this conflict goes on until one side wins, and the other loses. The Palestinian leadership – which makes its money off of war and suffering – will not quit until forced to quit. Only the massive application of firepower upon the Palestinians until they all come out, hands in the air, will end this.

Feminists and Conservatives are joining forces against the misbegotten “Equality Act”:

The Equality Act just passed the House Judiciary Committee last week, and it threatens to erase protections for women — protections that benefit women and society as a whole. Legislative and policy “reforms” proposed in this dangerous bill will lead to blatant violations of our safety, privacy, and dignity.

Under this bill, men and boys will take away women’s small business grants and hard-won spots on sports teams; they will be allowed to live in women’s domestic violence shelters and use our locker rooms. And united as women, we are just not going to stand for it.

To illustrate their case, they note the story of a man who identifies as a woman being seen naked in the women’s sauna (by teenaged girls): when the incident was reported the power of the State was brought forth to force everyone to apologize to the guy exposing himself to little girls. It is good that there can be a united fight against pure insanity – but Feminists should think a bit deeper into this. It is the tearing down of societal norms – including the norms which say that certain tasks are for men, others for women – which lead us here. As far as allowing anyone – of any condition – to do whatever their talents allow, no one can have any complaint. But thinking that a woman can be a successful infantryman is just as absurd as thinking a man who identifies as a woman should be allowed to parade around the girls locker room. Men and women are different; they bring in many cases entirely different things to the table; it is the cooperation of the feminine and the masculine, as distinct things, which makes humanity human.

The Daily Caller has a story about how the money (about $100 million) provided to Flint, MI to remediate it’s water issue is being relentlessly misused – the most egregious thing, in my view, is the awarding of high priced contracts to a company with no experience in the work, while more experienced companies were denied contracts. It is a grift: the people who run Flint – ie, the criminally negligent people who created the water crisis – don’t give a damn about the people, and are merely using the bonanza of government dollars to line their own pockets. All of these are Democrats – and all of them will be “re-elected” or, at least, replaced with people who are just like they are. We need to start thinking about what to do – consistent with our federal values – about States and cities which are so badly misgoverned that we can’t rely on sane policy being pursued.

Trump’s counsel has sent a letter to AG Barr ripping the Mueller report pretty hard – on the grounds that Mueller didn’t follow the special counsel rules in writing his final report. I had noted that Mueller would make his report as lurid as he could, and he did. What Democrats are latching on to right now is Mueller’s statement that he couldn’t conclusively prove that Trump didn’t break the law. But Mueller’s job wasn’t to say one way or the other about that – his job was to see if there was a crime, and if there was, then to prosecute it. As he’s not prosecuting Trump or any Trump associate for collusion or obstruction of justice related to the 2016 campaign, Trump has been exonerated. Mueller deliberately muddied that fact.

A pro-baby killing Pennsylvania Democrat is proving himself to be just about as much an a**hole as you’d think.

Share this:

Like this:

Related

38 thoughts on “Open Thread”

Retired SpookMay 7, 2019 / 3:57 pm

American Jews have voted over 70% Democrat on average since 1968. It’ll be interesting to see if that changes in 2020. I’ve always had the impression that American Jews are, for the most part, Liberal Democrats first and Jews second. I’ve never been able to wrap my head around that given what would likely happen to them should the far Left ever get complete control.

AmazonaMay 7, 2019 / 6:22 pm

One would hope that the reaction of the Dem House to the Representative support for Hamas and the new Final Solution might wake some of them up. But I doubt it. That is because so little of the support for the Left is based on any kind of actual political philosophy, and is almost entirely based on the acceptance of the Left’s characterizations of the Right and those who are on the Right. Most of those on the Left are not FOR much of anything, just ardently, rabidly, blindly AGAINST the Invented Other the Left has created and fed to them.

And we need to remember that turning on the Left means abandoning that valuable belief in occupying the Higher Moral Ground, without having to actually DO anything. That is an addiction many can’t turn away from. That smug conviction of being smarter, more compassionate, more insightful, more everything, is not easy to give up, and it is what creates and keeps many on the Left.

Maybe we need to spend more time expanding on the observation that the Right thinks the Left is stupid, while the Left thinks the Right is evil. That would be an interesting debate, if one could be held without screeching from the left and the default to Because….Trump. Because we can document the stupidity of the Left, and all they can do support their conviction the Right represents evil is to repeat lies, just at increasingly high volume.

M. NoonanMay 7, 2019 / 10:55 pm

The Washington Post for the zillionth time (overall, not just WaPo) tried to make the argument today that the Nazis weren’t of the left. They get away with this because both they and their readers are stunningly ignorant of history. You’d think that the “Socialist” in “National Socialist” would be a bit of a clue for them, but they breeze past it…sure that anyone who likes war might be a right winger. What they ignore is why the Nazis wanted war – all part of their leftwing plan to make a new world run by a new humanity (sound familiar?).

AmazonaMay 8, 2019 / 9:31 am

This is what you get when you let Identity Politics take over from real politics. People don’t even consider the structure of the system they support, depending on labels and personalities.

I think the most basic definition of a leftist system is that it is collectivist and based on a massively powerful Central Authority. That’s the structure. The superficial details might be different from one to another, though when absolute power is attained these differences tend to blur together. So the government might own the means of production or it might just control the means of production or it might pay lip service to independent control of the means of production while imposing restrictive and controlling regulations and then controlling the resulting revenue, but the thing to look at is not so much the different ways the government deals with industry but the degree and kind of control the government can, and does, exert over the nation. All leftist systems are based on Central Authority imposing control over the populace.

Ryan MurphyMay 8, 2019 / 8:27 am

Their surety of unearned moral superiority is paramount. All else must be subservient to feeding the beast of being able to be smugly ‘right’ without any visible cost to oneself.

M. NoonanMay 7, 2019 / 10:53 pm

Just like there are two types of Catholics – them that is, and them that isn’t; those that isn’t vote Democrat. Those Jews who care about Judaism and Israel will shift, I think, to solidly GOP over the next couple election cycles. What percentage of Jews is that? Don’t know. It isn’t much, but it could shift a few House seats our way and really put Florida out of reach for the Democrats (if the GOP is really serious about stopping fraud in FL – and I think they are – then I don’t view FL as a battleground State any longer).

AmazonaMay 8, 2019 / 9:21 am

The Church has really wimped out when it has come to making it clear that supporting and enabling abortion is a sin. When the Pope had a photo op with Nancy Pelosi, who has been such an advocate of promoting and funding abortion, it turned my stomach. Biden is supposedly a Catholic, and he is also firmly in the pro-abortion camp. Nuns are allowed to be pro-abortion. Jesuits sound like flaming Liberals. A lot of individual parishes are standing firm, but the “leadership” of the Church is leaving it rudderless and drifting more and more to the Left, in complete abandonment of many of its old teachings.

I think we need to start talking about the obvious – global cooling. This has been the mildest spring in Phoenix I can ever remember. Yesterday it was 75 degrees in mid May. Today, the high will be 82. April’s average temp was 81. We are normally well into the mid to upper 90’s in May. I wonder if this current period of low solar flare activity has anything to do with it?

I am loving climate change

Retired SpookMay 8, 2019 / 9:20 am

Take what your experiencing to the extreme, and that’s what we’re experiencing in the Midwest. This past winter essentially lasted from late October to late April. We were still experiencing nighttime lows in the low 20’s in mid April. Our heating bill for the winter was nearly $500 more than our budget plan, and we have a geothermal heating/cooling system, which is very efficient. As I write this at 9:30 AM on May 8th, it’s 46 degrees.

AmazonaMay 8, 2019 / 9:45 am

The Maunder Minimum and Climate Change

While there has not been great resistance to Eddy’s arguments for a lull in solar magnetic activity during the Maunder Minimum, one of the main reasons why his ideas caught the imagination is more contentious. He claimed that the Maunder Minimum coincided in time with an era of colder weather, and that by implication the absence of magnetic activity was accompanied by a net fall in the total radiative output of the Sun. An implicit corollary is that in the intervening period the radiative output has been increasing, with a consequent warming of the Earth. This basic idea has been taken up by a section of the solar physics community, and a good recent summary of the evidence for the proposition that solar variability is an agent, if not the main agent, of the perceived recent climate change associated with global warming, is given in Hoyt & Schatten (1997).

Retired SpookMay 9, 2019 / 8:23 am

The beauty of man-caused climate change is that it can be anything the Left wants: hotter, cooler, more storms, fewer storms, stronger storms, weaker storms, wetter, drier, more wind, less wind. In fact the only thing they will avoid taking a stand on is what is normal. If I were a betting man, I’d bet that, at some point, the vast majority of people will simply lose interest. The argument has been going on for close to 40 years on warming, and there was a 40 year cooling cycle before that, although the Left hadn’t figured out how to make it a cash cow. I’m reminded of President Eisenhower’s farewell address. Everyone who was alive then undoubtedly remembers his warning about the military-industrial complex, but few remember the second warning in that same speech:

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

ClusterMay 9, 2019 / 8:35 am

…. the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

WOW … it’s like he had a crystal ball

Retired SpookMay 9, 2019 / 9:33 am

WOW … it’s like he had a crystal ball

More likely he simply knew people whose goal in life was to cultivate the rise of the technological elite.

jdge1May 8, 2019 / 5:39 pm

I visited my daughter in Phoenix for the past several years around late January to early March. This was certainly the coolest weather wise for my visits. My daughter also mentioned it rain more than usual too.

ClusterMay 9, 2019 / 8:21 am

We have had a lot of rain this year, in fact more just yesterday. This morning it is 64 degrees with an expected high of 86. Unusual … but we are loving it

I have read a lot about the Maunder Minimum as Amazona posted and our climate is definitely cooling because of it. I think we are entering a multi year cooling trend so it will be interesting what the climate hysterics come up with now

M. NoonanMay 9, 2019 / 12:59 pm

We’re only getting into the 70’s here in Vegas, with rain. Our average rainfall for May is 0.12 inches – we’ve already beaten that by a country mile. Meanwhile, our average high for May is 89 and I’m usually tanned, rested and ready for Summer by now…

I had to run up to Denver today and waited till afternoon till it stopped snowing. I still had some sleet but at least it stayed above freezing (barely) so the roads weren’t bad, though I now need to add windshield washer fluid.

Retired SpookMay 8, 2019 / 10:00 am

Charles C. W. Cooke, the editor of National Review, wrote this excellent article for the NRA’s newsletter, America’s 1st Freedom.

There is a common trait that marks out those who would undermine freedom of speech, and that trait is cowardice. The man who is confident in his positions—and, by extension, in his ability to argue on their behalf and to recruit others to his side—sees no need to resort to the censorship of others, nor any reason to encourage those who disagree with him to stay quiet. By contrast, the man who suspects that his position is weak—and who, in consequence, has no faith whatsoever in the appeal of his ideas—knows instinctively that he can improve his position by removing the voices of opposition.

ClusterMay 9, 2019 / 8:27 am

….knows instinctively that he can improve his position by removing the voices of opposition.

I think we all need to very alarmed by this recent desire or passion amongst Democrats to indict and imprison those they disagree with. Last night I caught of a little of Larry O’Donnell over PMSNBC and he and his two panelists were giddy that Barr could face jail time. They were ready to lock him up right there.

Even though Hillary in all likelihood really deserved to be locked up, Trump and the Republicans never had the stomach for it and never pursued it, and certainly not with the zeal Dems do.

Retired SpookMay 8, 2019 / 10:24 am

Interesting new Monmouth University poll about socialism. Some surprising aspects, but the take-away that should raise a red flag for Democrats is this:

About 4-in-10 (42%) have a negative opinion of socialism in general, with another 45% having a neutral opinion and just 10% holding a positive view of socialism. (emphasis – mine)

So if Democrats want to run on a socialist platform that has 10% support from the general public, I say, knock yourselves out.

AmazonaMay 8, 2019 / 2:13 pm

That is good news—-and I have a feeling that the 10% who like it and the 45% with a neutral position are thinking of socialism as an essentially benign system that just takes money away from those who have a lot to give it to those who don’t. That is the way it is portrayed by the Left, which is always trying to hide the ugly truth about it.

JeremiahTMMMay 9, 2019 / 2:28 am

So Democrats have made clear that they are not about investigations, or about Mueller, or his report. They have made clear that they are about impeaching the President. That’s all they want. So they can individually sing “I’ve got the power”.

What are they going to do next?

Natler, I don’t know what’s up with him, except that he thinks he’s the new fuhrer-in-chief. Chief Natler. They’re all wannabe fuhrer-in-chief on the libtard side.

They’re going to get a big surprise, massive. The ol bloodhounds are on their trail.

ClusterMay 9, 2019 / 8:32 am

Someone needs to tell me what law requires the President to turn over his tax returns to Congress. I am just not buying it. The Dems are repeatedly saying that this is required by law and I just don’t think that’s the case.

Nevertheless, the Dems have taken their maniacal Trump obsession to a new level and I think it will help him in 2020. It’s becoming obvious that the truth is not what they are after. It’s Trump and his family who they want and that is solidly banana republic type thinking.

ClusterMay 9, 2019 / 9:05 am

“If you think that the left loves any of these groups try being one. Try being black or gay or transgender and disagree with them once. See what happens. ….. How many times have we seen the left claim that someone isn’t authentically black or authentically a woman because some person dared to offer a conservative viewpoint?

I think you will see a lot more people leaving the Democrat plantation over the next year.

Saw a funny cartoon—Mueller scolding Barr that his summary didn’t include Mueller’s angry-face emojis. That pretty much sums it up.

I just hope that the GOP and all GOP candidates are archiving all this stuff to bring out during the election cycle. To me, one of the most bizarre images I have seen is Nadler’s fat face gnawing on a piece of chicken, as if that was supposed to mean anything to anyone not stuck in infantile posturing.

Retired SpookMay 9, 2019 / 10:08 am

The ads are going to write themselves. When I saw that creep, Stephen Cohen, the Congressman from Tennessee who did the chicken stunt, my first thought was, I hope he chokes on a chicken bone. Does that make me a bad person?

AmazonaMay 9, 2019 / 11:08 am

When I saw a fat face oozing stupidity and hate, I just assumed it was Nadler. Thanks for pointing out there are more just as distasteful polluting the halls of Congress. That really cheered me up.

AmazonaMay 9, 2019 / 11:09 am

I ran across an interesting article this morning:
(emphasis mine)

We can value the freedom of a gay person and also value the freedom of the cake baker who does not want to attend his wedding and celebrate that wedding for religious reasons. We have to celebrate his freedom because if we don’t celebrate the freedom of the people we disagree with, we’re only celebrating power. If we don’t celebrate the freedom of the people we disagree with we’re only celebrating power. Because when he’s in power, when he’s got the gun, when he’s got the government, what argument have you got left that’s going to keep him from taking your freedom away?

About the hypocrisy of Hollywood: ”…they go to Georgia so they don’t have to pay the unions when they’re making their movie about how great unions are. I mean that’s really true. They go to Budapest to film things, so they don’t have to pay the teamsters while they’re making a movie about Norma Rae and how wonderful it is that she unionized the shop.”

If we don’t celebrate the freedom of the people we disagree with we’re only celebrating power.

I not only celebrate the freedom of those I disagree with, I’ve served to protect that freedom. I can’t say that I’ve EVER heard a Liberal make that statement.

AmazonaMay 9, 2019 / 11:57 am

We need to remember, it always comes down to power. It is either the belief that power should be distributed among the people or concentrated to be used to control them.

M. NoonanMay 9, 2019 / 12:57 pm

Some liberal on Twitter was ranting on about how with the school shootings, he was starting to not care about people who exercise their right to bear arms…the moron doesn’t realize that if he won’t care about rights of others, they won’t care about his.

AmazonaMay 9, 2019 / 11:55 am

Another entry into the “Dems overreaching to their own detriment” column. From Colorado:

Dems, including Senator Michael Bennett (newly announced presidential hopeful) and Representative Jason Crow, who ran a totally despicable campaign of lies dedicated to the sliming of his opponent, attended a vigil of students from the STEM school where a student was shot to death trying to protect his fellow students. And, true to form, tried to use the event to promote their anti-gun agenda and actually used it to tell students to vote for Democrats.

Just a note in passing: The “adult” shooter, who is 18, is clearly a disturbed youth, whose mental health issues were evidently ignored. His fellow shooter is a 15-year-old boy “transitioning” into a girl. I’m going out on a limb here and suggesting that neither received any mental health counseling or attention because it would have been ‘intrusive, insensitive, bigoted’ blah blah blah.

The kids at the school recognize this, but the so-called “adults” so eager to hijack a vigil for the student who gave his life to protect others and the students wounded in the attack were focused solely on their view of this as just another crisis to be exploited. I hope memories are strong when it comes to voting for either of them again.

M. NoonanMay 9, 2019 / 12:55 pm

RSM noted that angle of it – they are kids who are clearly crazy, but if anyone had said “hey, they’re crazy”, the SJW’s would have been howling for blood. The bottom line is that we have to put our entire society at risk in order to make crazy people feel comfortable…but, being crazy, nothing we do can accomplish that.

AmazonaMay 9, 2019 / 2:15 pm

Today I read that Shooter # 2 is a girl transitioning into being a male. Who can keep up with the shell game of gender fluidity?

AmazonaMay 9, 2019 / 12:13 pm

Maybe Mueller should read his report and have it published as an audio book. Then his whining, sneering, whimpering and snarls would be more obvious and he wouldn’t have to carry on about Barr failing to accurately portray them.